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Archive of Jul 2012

Some commenters claim the Red Flag exercise is not indicative of the way the F-22 would fight in the real world. In an actual shooting war, an F-22′s opponent “won’t make it to visual range,” one reader asserted. The stealthy Raptor would allow it to sneak up high and fast and kill the enemy from long range using an AMRAAM missile, commenters insist.

Today’s troll is “E Martin,” responding to my article about Germans defeating the U.S. Air Force F-22 in mock combat. The troll, with the email address bemartin@nb.sympatico.ca and the IP address 4.59.182.110, writes …

Sometime in the next few years the world’s most sophisticated drone prototypes will likely face off in what could be a multi-billion-dollar competition to shape the future of air warfare. And now we finally know what all four contestants look like.

The fast, stealthy F-22 Raptor is “unquestionably” the best air-to-air fighter in the arsenal of the world’s leading air force. That’s what outgoing Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz wrote in 2009.

Via The DEW Line blog, here’s Lockheed Martin art depicting the company’s newest killer drone, the Sea Ghost. The flying-wing, jet-powered robot is Lockheed’s entry into the Navy’s competition for a carrier-launched strike and surveillance drone. Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, Boeing’s X-45C and the General Atomics Sea Avenger are all contenders.

Nearly a year before a gunman burst into the Century Aurora 16 movie theater and murdered 12 people in Aurora, Colorado, police in the Denver suburb prepared for the worst. Along with police across the Denver region, they scrambled to respond to simulated terrorist attacks during an exercise modeled on the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, where coordinated bombings and shootings by militants killed 164 people.

The crumbling regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad reportedly unleashed its air force on Wednesday in what could be the biggest aerial onslaught of the more than year-old civil war. Jet fighters dropped bombs on the northern city of Aleppo, Reuters and the BBC reported.

Earlier this year, the spy satellite industry was hit hard by defense budget cuts. For the top two commercial satellite companies, which survive largely by providing imagery to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, the cuts left only enough money for one to survive. Now budget austerity has forced the companies to merge together and create a new space monopoly with control over what we see from orbit.

Since at least February the Syrian government has been using Iranian-built Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to track and target Free Syrian Army rebels in their strongholds, including Homs and Hamah. Now some fresh commercial satellite imagery provides new details about the drone’s possible tactics and capabilities.

If in its final hours Syria’s crumbling government unleashes a chemical barrage — and some analysts certainly think that’s possible — the regime will probably rely on an arsenal of gas- or nerve agent-tipped ballistic missiles purchased from Iran and North Korea.

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War Is Boring is a collective of citizen journalists with a deep interest in world and national security. We are expeditionary, traveling to conflict zones whenever possible, on our dime — and yours. We are wary of partisan politics, skeptical of the military-industrial-media complex and free of war buzzwords. R.I.P., Old Media; long live New Media.

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